Big and small boundaries

How about this fence which is quite literally the boundary of the field, stopping me from getting in and the cows from getting out.

There are many boundaries in this photo. My daughter is riding along the boundary fence in the show-jumping area of the field. There are also distant hedges, fences and that cliff-like part is the far side of the river which is also lurking down there. The river is a natural boundary, unless you have built a bridge over it.

In this one she’s jumping another fence – another boundary. In reality of course you could just ride around this one, but for the purposes of show-jumping it is a boundary you need to get across in order to proceed.

As you may have noticed I have a bit of a scientific, biological interest in small things and I couldn’t avoid thinking on the small scale. I started to think about how water droplets form with a boundary with the air. It’s all about surface tension. The molecules of water on the edge (the boundary molecules) are more attracted to the other water molecules (i.e. more attracted inwards) than they are to the air (outwards). So they pull inwards into a droplet shape. And apart from the cool science, they look pretty too 🙂